Hey, recently we got like 750 downloads and almost no views and I'm a bit concerned because we don't want to be blocked or anything because we didn't do anything to get them like a bot or something. If stuff like this happens should I get in touch with the support to erase the downloads or what is the best way to show that this wasn't our intention?

I don't know where you live but at a threshold you probably need to pay income tax. I make the really pessimistic assumption of gross income*0.35 to assume it for future paid titles. I don't know if you need to think about VAT - it was the case that I needed to pay VAT extra on top of a game if I bought it from a European developer (and I'm also based in Germany) but this has changed I think (I tried to donate to the same game at the moment and wasn't asked for VAT.) I wouldn't think a lot about it yet - first of all try to get 1000 bucks of gross income - there should be your focus :D

We try to do everything. I will share some tips but some of them are very basic and I don't know which of them you already thought about.

Caveat: We only have free games and don't sell any (yet). So, take this with a grain of salt, I just share what worked for us and we do a lot of this before we release a game.

Write to press. Like really many people. Give them free copies, if you don't do this, they won't review your game (they might not do this anyway). Don't stay away from little blogs. You won't get much out of it but if you can be everywhere you should. Write to press that isn't in your native language (I assume it's English) and send them free copies with an English message.

Write to YouTubers and Streamers. The chance that they will pick up your game is tiny but it's possible. Our biggest spike ever (1500 downloads in two days) was with a Let's Play of a big YouTuber from Brazil (we were just lucky btw).

If you think about a Linux port - the community and press around this is often very welcoming even if the market is tiny.

Reddit was a great way at least for us to share our game. r/gaming is relatively pointless if you don't really know how to use Reddit, just use niche subreddits for your game and do not just market it - be part of the community etc.

I saw that you have a devlog - share it maybe on more platforms, if you haven't already. Long term YouTube might pay off.

And rework your trailer - we also need to figure this out but your trailer is not great. Get some inspiration from the bigger Indies - it's one of your best assets. I saw that you only used like 3 tags on your Itch.io page - use all of them.

Many of these things require a lot of work so I would recommend three things:

- Get someone with an AMD CPU and Graphics Card to test your game to complete the system requirements.

- Use all the tags (and rewrite some of the description - that this game is made by one person is nice but it shouldn't be the main hook and you have some errors in the text (we often ask people who can write better English than we can to help us (we are German, still learning)))

- Write to press (and maybe rewrite your trailer before)

After that a list of things which people recommend but we don't do:

- Have a Discord (we don't have enough followers yet)

- Ads (we don't really know how it works, don't like it really and don't have so much spare money)

- Support every system possible (we don't have a Mac and don't have spare money to buy one, we don't do mobile (yet) for various reasons)

Long time no see! Sorry – this won't happen again that soon (hopefully). Due to the fact that we were in Berlin at the A MAZE. and visited Poland after that our schedule was a bit all over the place. But we have made two videos nevertheless – first of all our new DevDiary video and second the A MAZE.-Video, check it out if you want to!

We make a lot of progress on different things – Angela is doing a lot for Devastated: Andrew's Dictaphone and I'm very happy with the new direction because it looks much better than the old art.

We put a lot of emphasis on animation so that the whole game should give you a vivid impression of the story.

Sure enough, we still need to start recording the voice part but at the moment I'm happy with the progress and I hope that we will release the game this month. But we don't want to announce anything yet and give it some freedom to evolve.

Angela also started learning to work with ProBuilder in Unity to help me when we will focus on 3D games – I will do everything related to more complex modelling but Angela can do the basic leveldesign and this should definitely speed up the development. I made a basic sink which is more or less finished right now and I'm practicing everyday.

It will take a bit longer but I'm really confident with this. It wasn’t really that useful when I was learning programming and would only have been applicable in the future and I had no real visual progress. With 3D modelling I can help with future progress and do visual art – something which I never had really access to. I really can't draw so 3D modelling is the best way for me to learn.

We also wanted to thank you for over 3000 Flufftopia downloads! This number is incredible and we never had expected this success. By the way – Angela also started a blog and she will report a bit broader about our progress. I often focus on one project and she thought it would be neat to have a wider perspective. You can look it up on her tumblr or on Steemit!

Hey Daniel (ha, that's my name too :D), I uploaded a Linux and Macbuild - normally we only do Windows and after a week we also upload a Linux version after we tested it properly (at the moment we aren't at home and can't test it) but we don't have any testing rig at home for MacOS and I don't feel so comfortable with untested builds. Nevertheless I made an exception for you and I hope it works :'D

After 72 hours the game jam ends now and we are very happy :D We didn't manage to include a German build and a Linux version but we will put one only after the rating ends. Our speed devlog experiment worked fine and we think that we will do it again - maybe next Ludum Dare?We also made a video about our progress. If you want to you can watch it :D

We also wanted to have more characters, more levels, more more more but we finished it and that's the goal :)

We are making progress :D So far we have the basic level layout, some code, some objects and 2D stuff for the dating sim part :D We never did 3D before so we are a bit slow especially in regards to texturing but we learned a lot on the way. I think we will manage to complete the game in time, maybe not with Linux support and maybe not in German but completed :)

Ludum Dare started and we (Daniel,
@Moaning_Clock and Angela, @MadameYavi) thought it would be a neat
idea to write a devlog and post one or two entrys a day :D

We also make a YouTube video about our
progress everyday. You can check out the first one if you want to!

Today was a slow day for us because we
went to the birthday party of my grandmother and it's a very long
distance for us. We woke up ten minutes before the jam began (three
o'clock in the morning in Germany) and discussed the theme in first
train we took. We had ideas about a Point & Click racing game (an
idea we‘ve been thinking about for quite a long time now for no
particular reason), a mashup of a shooter and a dating sim, a horror
tower defense game and many more. But none of them stuck with us for
different reasons but then I came up with the idea of a mashup of a
3D platforming game and a dating sim with some really weird elements.
This idea is perfect for us because I can make 3D models (something I
started to learn recently), Angela can make 2D art for the textures
and the dating part, it shouldn't be super hard to program
(hopefully!) and we can expand or shrink the concept if we need to.
We planned on making 3D games in the future nevertheless so it‘s a
perfect opportunity to start learning! We want to release it for
Windows and Linux but if we don't have enough time left for proper
testing we will only make a Windows build (but add a Linux build
after the jam). If we have enough time left we are also going to make
a German localization but we will see how it is going.

We now have some basic 3D models, some
textures and many ideas which we want to implement! We don‘t have
that much to show yet though because we‘ve been on the road all
day. But this will, of course, change very soon. So, wish us luck :D
The next days are going to be interesting :) Until later and happy
jamming!

Hey
folks, we changed some of the plans regarding Devastated and decided
to make a narrative piece instead of a more traditional Point &
Click game. It will be a bit like a walking simulator but in the
boundaries of a Point & Click game. We decided this way because
we simply weren't happy with the old idea anymore and that meant:
change it or scrap it. We changed it and we think the new concept
might be even more interesting :D

I
hope the game will be finished in the next 2-3 weeks but no promises
here! The title won't change and the artstyle will also stay the
same. We also have a new video where we speak a bit about the
development of Devastated and show some of the process how we are
doing the art now :)

Hello!
I thought I would write the next post for this devlog when the 1.2 is
out which will be in a few weeks/months but it seems that I was
mistaken. Anyway, a new update for Flufftopia is out now! Sorry, it's
not an April Fools' joke, just a little update. We only wanted to
change something in the credits and just push it out silently but
then we thought about adding a tiny bit of content to the game.
There's one typo in the German version which is fixed now and a new
random fact! We also added a new worker :)

We
call it the 1.1.1 and it's exactly 1 percent better than ever before!
At the moment, we are working on Devastated and make steady
progress. In regards to Linux we multibooted an old PC (which I
recently bought from a friend) with Solus and Ubuntu (and Windows
8.1) so we have another testing machine (Flufftopia runs nicely on
Solus and Ubuntu!) and aren't only relying on my little Lubuntu
machine. Still we only tested the 64 bit versions but it seems this
is the absolute majority of Linux users today. As we were testing we
also found a little error which we fixed (nobody noticed it before).
We also changed the compress format for the Linux versions from .zip
to .tar.gz because it seems to fit more and afaik the permissions are
saved in the .tar.gz file but not in a .zip file. Sorry, if I'm wrong
– my knowledge about Linux is still limited but I'm working on it
:D

We
had a bug on Ubuntu regarding a part of the story where you need to
type something and every input was taken twice even if you would just
press one time. This seems to be a problem for Ubuntu (in other
distros it runs fine) with our particular version of Unity and we
simply changed the text that needs to be typed instead of fixing it
(workarounds ftw :D). We could have updated Unity but this can lead
to horrible outcomes so we just went the safe route. There was also
another minor bug which only one person pointed out and we also fixed
that.

Nice to hear that you already are considering in changing it :) It would be nice if you could look up the numbers of the two replaced/deleted numbers but only if it isn't a lot of work. I have the numbers from a day before and wrote the complete download numbers down after it happened and can calculate them with a margin of error which is definitely enough for the postmortem.

Does it affect the ranking when I delete a file? I think many developers would consider deleting their "Hidden Files" (and free up storage) if they would keep the statistics and would know if it affects the ranking.

Today, I reuploaded my Windows build to test something and I think since it was named like the old file the system deleted the file that was online. After I saw this I tried it again to verify it with my other windows build (the english one) and quit without saving, sadly the build was deleted nevertheless. It would be great to have some sort of warning message? It's not a big problem for me because I simply reuploaded the two builds but I fear a bit that it has an effect on the rank and also I wanted to share detailed numbers in a postmortem.

tl;dr: I think it would be great if you could see the download numbers from deleted builds.

Back on track. We initially thought we
would continue this devlog in the end of February but it seems that
we needed a bit more time. Angela is redoing more of the old art to
give the game a consistent and clean look. She also started working
on the code for the game and at the moment everything seems to be
working. We also are making a little game on the side with a friend
of ours. It's also a Point and Click Adventure so we can reuse a bit
of the code :D

We wanted to release Devastated in the
first quarter of this year but after our programmer left the studio
we wanted to create a smaller game first to get enough experience.
The outcome was Flufftopia, an experimental clicker game:
https://smokesomefrogs.itch.io/flufftopia.

We are confident that we can release
Devastated in the next one or two months :D

Hey, I just wanted to ask is there any other option to look for languages other than typing the language in the search bar which is a little bit inconvenient because for example when I search for Dutch games I get also games in English about the flying dutchman etc.

Surely there is the possibility to click on a language of a game in the description or type it in the address bar /lang-andtheabbreviationforthelanguage but this methods also are not as fast as possible.

If there's not an option which I simply haven't seen yet, I wanted to ask if you could add the option to add a language button in the left where people can search especially for their languages? And also maybe control the ones which are adding 10 or more? ~ (some of them are just textless; this annoys me a lot on Steam.)

Sometimes I just want to play a game in a language which I'm learning and I think it would encourage localization :)

First of all thank you so much for the
support and the nice feedback :D

We were incredibly lucky and got
featured by a YouTuber from Brazil, Felps. He has over two million
subscribers and he made a video about Flufftopia! Even though my mom
is from Portugal my Portuguese is really bad but I did understand
what he said more or less :D

Also we got featured on the Twitter
account of Itch.io which was very nice and unexpected since the game
has been released two weeks ago :) We thought only new games are
featured on Twitter so it was a nice surprise :D

Due to the Let's Play many people
visited our page on Itch.io. It's incredible to have so many
downloads. Our secret dream was to get 1000 downloads in the first
month – at the moment we have over 2000 which is crazy. Our last
game Intra-System: Trust Issues has around 1500 downloads after a
year now and the numbers of Flufftopia were great for our standards
even before the Let's Play. Honestly, it's fucking bananas and came
from nowhere. Especially after our horrible launch.

We got asked if we could make an
Android version but at the moment we don't want to. It's always kind
of a balancing act – when we are porting and testing the ports we
can't expand our games/create new ones etc. If we wanted to make a
good port for mobile platforms we would need to redesign a lot of the
game and we don't think that it fits the platform; also iOS won't
happen and Mac isn't very probable in the near future since we don't
have one. At the moment, we focus on Devastated and after that we
want to work on a new and bigger game and also release the 1.2 of
Flufftopia which will contain an Idle Mode, additions to the story
and many little tweaks. We also want to expand the list of random
facts about Flufftopia because it seems that this is a major part of
the experience for many players.

Do YOU have any suggestions for
Flufftopia for the major update? It will still need some time and we
would appreciate any ideas :D If you want to say something about the
story please make sure to write a spoiler warning or something like
that :)